RTFM Works

Last gasp accomplishment for the day - Friday. The inhouse software guru spoke - it's just RTFM. Use Zterm on the Mac to connect to the radio. Before that, open up the manual for Roving Networks' radio that Sparkfun is using. I keep claiming to want to be in RF, how come I never did that? Hmmm..

Anyhow, in this case, the Mac never did pair with the modem - needed default passkey, not no passkey. So, Igoe should really have said to RTFM.

What I have noticed with Zterm is this - you can power up the modem and use Zterm to talk to the modem in command mode - as long as TX/RX are not connected to the AVR. If they are, no hope.

Then, if you have connected TX/RX to the AVR and are running the monski pong sensor reader program, you can't get the sensor values - no matter how many /r's you send - which is exactly what the Processing sketch does. Why? If I run the Processing monski_pong_handshake sketch, stuff works fine. And then, once the sketch is up and running, I can interrupt it and go into Zterm and continue reading sensor values using Zterm. What's going on??

Whoops, and just like that, after my friend returns, stuff behaves. I can go into CMD mode arbitrarily, and even read sensor data through Zterm. The trick seems to be to wait a few seconds after powering up the Arduino setup. After that, the Mac has paired with the device and made the serial port available. Of course, once the Mac has seen the device, the serial port is always available. But, if you try connecting to it 5 seconds after you power up the bluetooth modem, you're out of luck.